During
the course of 1990 to 1996, out of personal interest, I carried out a series
of 10 surveys on the age of vehicles (of which, of course, most were cars) on
the roads from the area around my home in Lancashire, U.K. For those who are
unfamiliar with the United Kingdom licence plate system, it is easy to determine
the age of a vehicle: up to 2001, a prefix or suffix letter would indicate the
year of registration that ran from 1 August to 31 July the following year; from
2001 there is a new system in place.

In order
to keep the results comparable between surveys, I ensured that the number of
vehicles in the 1990-1996 surveys was the same each time as for the first survey
(i.e. 3184 vehicles, in June 1990). Nowadays more comprehensive data by the
Department of Transport are available online, but as far as I am aware the data
only go back to 1994, so I've reproduced my own results below in case they are
of interest to anyone else. A comparison between my own data and the Department
of Transport's seems to indicate that the two sources are fairly consistent.
The graph on this page, with one line for each year, includes combined data
for 1990, 1993 and 1994 as two surveys were carried out in those years. Unfortunately
I carried out most of my surveys in late July which was close to the start of
the new registration year at the time (as mentioned above, the registration
year used to start on 1st August), but hopefully this does not affect the usefulness
of the data too much, which is reproduced in full in the table below. As always,
please feel free to make use of the data, but if you do so please ensure you
credit me for it.

For ease
of reading in the table below, the following colours are used: over
0.2% or 6 vehicles; over 1% or 30 vehicles;
over 5% or 150 vehicles; over
10% or 300 vehicles.

Also included
on this page, for comparison, are surveys carried out by other people in 1965,
1973 & 1975 and reproduced in the book "The Car Market" by M J
H Mogridge, Pion, 1983.